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To elaborate, and torture that title a bit, this Paul Gross vehicle is a comedy western loaded with chuckles that only occasionally fires blanks.

Spitballing bushwackers — sissy intellectuals in berets, shades and “I Heart Jean-Luc Godard” T-shirts — might wish for something a bit deeper from actor Gross and writer/director William Phillips (Foolproof), who are both capable of more cerebral stuff.

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Gross and Phillips pass up a golden opportunity to really have at the topic of cross-border cultural traits. They only mildly spoof the American love of guns and the Canadian abhorrence of them, in a movie set in the 1880s that could have illuminated how this schizo split began in the first place.

The pistol is primed, but the gunpowder is damp. The humour in Gunless is more sitcom than scathing, playing like something that could have been called Corner Gas 1882.

That’s the year, as the story goes, that U.S. gunslinger The Montana Kid (Gross) arrives in Barclay’s Brush (pop. 29), a dry gulch hamlet in the “Dominion of Canada.” On the run from bounty hunters (led by Gross’s old Due South pal Callum Keith Rennie), he’s barely made it across the border, strapped to his trusty steed and carrying unwanted lead in his hide.

The Kid isn’t one for grooming — he has scarecrow hair and reeks to high heaven — and he’s also not much on hospitality, either the giving or the accepting of it. When local blacksmith Jack Smith (Tyler Mane) kindly offers gratis assistance to the Kid’s horse, he’s greeted with a Colt .45 in his face and the demand of a sundown shootout.

The Kid adheres to the Code of the West, which in his interpretation of it means shooting anybody that so much as looks as you sideways.

Jack scoffs. The Kid insists. Meanwhile, rapturous farmer Jane (Sienna Guillory) scowls, pointing to the very Canadian disinclination of Barclay’s Brush inhabitants to carry handguns. She possesses the only pistol in town, and it’s broken.

Jane offers the busted blaster to Kid in exchange for some windmill repairs on her farm. He can wind her up while waiting for the pistol to be repaired by the very obliging Jack. But he’s not the only one getting guns ready for the Kid.

This interlude allows the Kid to get to know the other locals. They include Mountie lawman Corp. Jonathan Kent (Dustin Milligan) and his loyal but cranky sidekick, a native Canadian named Two Dogs (Graham Greene).

In the spin-off sitcom that Gunless would be perfect for, you’d have to think that the corporal and Two Dogs would play recurring and major roles. Here, they’re pushed to the back of the laugh bus, with profiles just slightly higher than the other supporting yuksters. The camera almost never leaves Gross, who makes the most of his close-ups with fine comic timing and a drawl that pays homage to his hero Clint Eastwood.

Phillips wrote and directed a solid 2001 drama called Treed Murray. It examined issues of race, wealth and social climbing from the desperate perspective of an executive (David Hewlett) who had been chased into a park and up a tree at night by a marauding gang.

The movie regrettably played to the sound of crickets chirping, which may explain why Phillips has since moved on to more mainstream fare like the caper comedy Foolproof and now the comedy western Gunless. Why aim for the brain when the funny bone is so much easier to reach?

Still, Gunless does have its heady moments. They include a sublime soundtrack by Blue Rodeo stalwart Greg Keelor and evocative lensing by cinematographer Gregory Middleton, who makes mountainous Osoyoos, B.C. (where the movie was filmed) look like a scene from a John Ford movie.

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